Week 13 - 2020
Harold Edgerton, Bullet and apple, 1964. Preus Museum Collection
Apple in motion
Earlier this year, Burger King released a new commercial promoting their burgers. However, it wasn’t the image of a delicate, fresh burger that caught our attention. It was a burger covered in mould. The thought behind the commercial was to represent the company's efforts in reducing the number of preservatives within their burgers. Pictures signify particular meanings, and irrelative to mould, food and photo is often a good combo.
Food is experiential, and pictures of food have a long tradition; from baroque still-life with bountiful bowls of fruit, grapes, apples and pheasants, up until today's fast-food platters. The freshness of the food and its impermanence does in many ways suit the camera's ability to capture a moment, while still keeping an impression of something that once was, and which will eventually wither and fade.
This image, captured by Harold Edgerton (1903-1990), shows movement. Contrary to that of a passive worm creeping its way through an apple, we see movement caused by a rapid bullet. Edgerton managed to capture a movement invisible to our naked eye using the combination of an extremely fast shutter speed and strobe flash.
With the technological advancements of today, anyone is able to create images like this, and we can easily forget somebody had this idea first as well as the ability to research it ahead of time. This photo reveals a hidden part of the world to us and in this way the apple can humbly find its historical place amongst other famous apples, from that of Eden to Newtons garden.